Why Newt's Personal Life Matters to You (but Not Matt Bai)

So Newt Gingrich, the man who invented the politics of personal destruction, is running for president of the United States. In spite of his many problems as a candidate, such is the weakness of the Republican field that his candidacy should not be taken lightly.

What are those potentially disqualifying problems? Well, chiefly, Gingrich has the most untidy personal life of any serious candidate for the presidency in the modern era. It is now legend that he served his first wife, Jackie (his high-school math teacher) her divorce papers while she recuperated from cancer surgery (Gingrich's daughter contests that account here). Thanks to John H. Richardson's definitive profile of Newt in last September's Esquire, we now know that Gingrich had asked his second wife, Marianne, to marry him before his divorce from Jackie had been initiated. Further, we also know that he carried on a six-year affair with a congressional staffer, Callista Bisek, who would become his third wife, while he was married to Marianne. Interestingly, Gingrich also asked Callista to marry him before seeking a divorce from Marianne. Also of note: He asked Marianne for a divorce shortly after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. All of this is known.

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Correctly, Gingrich has said that, "If the primary concern of the American people is my past, my candidacy would be irrelevant." On the other hand, he goes on to say, if you're looking for a conservative visionary, I'm your man. This is the right-wing media narrative that is coalescing around the Gingrich candidacy: The strong intimation that given all the problems that America now faces, an unseemly fascination with Gingrich's personal affairs is out of bounds, and must not deprive the country and the world of Gingrich's leadership at a critical time. Of course, the right-wing meme goes, this unseemly fascination with a man's personal life is driven by the liberal media.

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Allow me to sympathize for a moment with the impulse to wall off one's personal life from consideration of a candidate's qualifications for office. And I'll even be so generous as to leave aside pointing out the stupid irony that it is Newt Gingrich's own conservative cohort that has been most expert at savaging opponents for the moral failings that we all possess, all while presuming to tinker righteously with the moral lives of the American people. I'll leave aside, too, the entire Clinton presidency and the Arkansas Project, the well-financed right-wing conspiracy to destroy the 42nd president by ransacking his personal life — not to mention creating disgusting fictions about rape and even murder supposed to have been committed by Clinton. I'll also leave aside the impeachment of the president foisted on the country by Newt Gingrich's own House of Representatives.

I'll even go so far as to say that in the curious candidacy of Newton Leroy Gingrich, I don't care about any of those things. What I do care about, deeply — aside from Gingrich's somewhat incoherent career as a policymaker and thinker, and his habit for more than thirty years of slinging the nastiest slander at anyone who'd presume to get in his way — is Gingrich's state of mind and his fitness to serve in office. And so should you. When a man presumes to ask the American people to confer on him the greatest power in the world, these are essential matters. Illuminating these issues is perhaps the most important job of a journalist working these precincts. And so America cares about Newt Gingrich's personal life not because of a gratuitous or prurient interest in his untidy marital history — that's between him and his wives — but because of what an examination of those aspects of his life reveals about his reliability, his state of mind, and his fitness to serve in high office.

But if you think it is just Gingrich acolytes or right-wing activists who are primly declaring any consideration of Gingrich's personal conduct out of bounds, you would be mistaken. For this week, those people got a big assist from none other than The New York Times, in the person of political correspondent Matt Bai. Bai has written fairly extensively on Gingrich in the past and earlier this week wrote a post on The Times's Caucus blog about the impending announcement of Newt's candidacy. Then, on Wednesday, Bai took to The Times's site with a video answering some of the many emails he had received in response to his post. By far the most interesting segment of this video had to do with this note from a reader:

How can a serial adulterer and a lapsed evangelical run on a 'family values platform'?

Bai read the question, and then answered it this way: "The reason I've chosen this one is because it's in so many of the comments — I would say a dominant theme of the mail I got is about Newt Gingrich's adultery and his past marriages and his personal transgressions. Now, I get that there's an issue here of hypocrisy, because of course Speaker Gingrich was one of the people who led the impeachment process against Bill Clinton. But here's the thing: I just don't really care about candidates' sex lives and personal lives and marriages. And I think voters care less and less. You can go to, like, a million blogs, and they'll talk all about his past transgressions and his personal life and whether it matters to voters and all that. You're just not really gonna find it in my work."

It's an extraordinary moment, when a New York Times reporter, charged with covering a candidate for the highest office that we elect people to, publicly abdicates his responsibilities, and in the smuggest possible way. "I don't care..." Bai says. Oh, really. Well, that settles that.

In the video, Bai absolves himself of the necessary hard work of truly covering Newt Gingrich's fitness for office, and will presumably busy himself with poring over Gingrich's stated objectives (to be found on Newt's Web site and in his policy speeches) to get at the real story. Bai seems not to be able to tell the difference between a gratuitous invasion of privacy for indecent or prurient tabloid purposes, and the justified examination of the soundness and steadiness of a candidate's conduct over time. And yes, that includes considering the totality of a person's life, as (note to Bai) life is lived holistically, not this part discrete and separate from that part. And yes, to determine what is fair to cover requires judgment. Bai has used his rather questionable judgment to a) arbitrarily draw a bright line between what he will and won't cover, and reflexively close off an entire area of inquiry in what amounts to a suspension of thought, and b) smugly insult anyone who thinks differently.

(And further, incomprehensibly, while Bai explains that questions of Gingrich's personal life constituted "a dominant theme of the mail" he had received about his column this week, nobody cares about these issues. And this man writes for the greatest newspaper in the world.)

Imagine if the great Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert Caro were to say that he didn't care that just as the United States was dramatically escalating the war in Vietnam, President Johnson was drinking at least a fifth of Cutty Sark a day, and was harboring dark, secret fears that he wasn't capable of the job of President. What if Caro were to say, "I don't really care about that stuff, because to know it and understand it would require me to cross a line and delve into the deepest, most personal parts of Lyndon Johnson's life?

Well, Caro wouldn't say that, but if he were to lose his mind one day and publicly pronounce such a thing, the only reasonable response would be: What good are you? And: Why should I read anything you have to write on the subject?

And, ladies and gentlemen, when Matt Bai of The New York Times says, "You're just not really gonna find it in my work..." the only reasonable response is Thank you, Matt. You've just saved us a lot of time that we would have wasted reading your work. And, oh: You might want to leave the journalism to someone who is more enterprising and discerning.

Because by simply declaring an entire constellation of subjects off-limits, you have missed an incredibly important feature of Newt Gingrich's character, and you would have missed the fact that when he was Speaker of the House, Gingrich essentially suffered a mental collapse — nervous breakdowns, they used to call them back in the day. But we won't find that in your work.

For that, we will need to read John H. Richardson's definitive profile of Gingrich, "The Indispensable Republican," right here....